It's that time again - now the fifth Game of the Year poll I've run on this forum!

Nominations for GotY 2014 have now closed. A big thank you to everyone who sent me their nominations. In total, there were 80 nominations comprising 45 different games.

Now we move on to the voting phase. Whereas nominating is time-consuming, what with looking back over a year's worth of games on apterous, voting is quick and simple. There were 11 games with ≥n nominations and a further 11 with (n-1) nominations. The top 11 games comprise the final poll, and the other 11 games that missed out by a single nomination are given an honourable mention below. Even if you're not inclined to vote, please do have a look through these 22 games as they make up some of the highlights from apterous in 2014, as chosen by apterites. Enjoy!

Voting rules:

Each person should submit one of 12 options for each game when voting: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 or Abstain (0 is worst and 10 is best). You can submit the same vote for as many games as you like. The games will be ranked by the average score received from the 0-10 votes (abstentions excluded), with the highest average score declared as the winner. You should submit a vote for every game, and abstentions are only permitted for games you were involved in (but you don't have to abstain in any case).

VOTING FOR GotY 2014 IS NOW OPEN AND WILL CLOSE ON SUNDAY 15 MARCH 2014 AT 11.59pm. VOTES SHOULD BE SUBMITTED TO ME BY PRIVATE MESSAGE ON THIS FORUM OR BY APTOMAIL. PLEASE SUBMIT EACH VOTE ON A SEPARATE LINE, IN THE FOLLOWING FORMAT:

Congratulations to Conor for scooping the top award, to Matthew for finishing as runner-up and to me and Innis on joint third place! Similar to last year, except that Conor and Matthew have swapped positions. The points breakdown for all 11 nominees is shown below.

Edit - I'm guessing you didn't vote given that you probably would have abstained for your own games and the scores wouldn't work.

Four people nominated (including me). I did vote and didn't abstain for my own games (I voted without looking at the other votes; my vote for Game J was the lowest of the three and for Game A was bang in the middle of the other two, so didn't affect its average).

The only time the votes flood in for this really is when it gets some publicity on the Apterous homepage. I requested this for the last week of voting but didn't get a response (to be fair I asked at the time when there was one week left, so maybe I left it a little late for Charlie to notice / respond).

Nominations and voting were each open for a month and I did my best to try to remind / drum up nominators and voters! Maybe the forum isn't the best place for this, and it should just be incorporated into apterous. I'm happy to keep running it though.

Charlie Reams wrote:

Gavin Chipper wrote: I think it's really good that you've done this, but I might put a ticket on Apterous to suggest GOTW-style system for 2012 onwards. I think you'd get more nominations.

It's very unlikely that I'd do it. GOTW is a monster pain in the arse to code and maintain, without running another parallel-but-slightly-different system. I like it when other people do stuff, I don't want to take it all over.